Izzi Software Signs Key Agreements with Bluehouse and Capricorn to Grow Development Capabilities and Expand Presence in US Government Market.

How many times have you read your own code and completely missed something that was right in front of you? If the answer is "more than I'd like to admit," you're in good company. This post explores the cognitive biases that cause developers to overlook bugs in their own code, why those blind spots exist, and what you can do to work around them.

New Z/XDC software expansion improves accessibility and integrates into existing workflows while welcoming a new generation of programmers into mainframing

Izzi Software just took a significant step forward in expanding its market presence by signing reseller agreements with two industry leaders: VIRTUTEM and IT Service Alliance (ITSA). These partnerships mark a strategic move to bring enterprise software solutions to a broader base of IBM Z and IBM i users worldwide. The partnership structure is straightforward but powerful. VIRTUTEM will sell IBM i products through Izzi's subsidiary CNX, while ITSA will offer the ColeSoft IBM Z solutions. Both companies will bundle these software platforms with their existing service offerings, creating comprehensive packages for enterprise clients facing complex technical challenges.

Picture this scenario: Your critical CICS region has been running for three weeks, processing millions of transactions. Suddenly, a specific transaction path starts behaving erratically. Traditional debugging would require bringing down the region, adding debugging hooks, and restarting. That means potentially hours of downtime and lost state information. Cross-memory debugging with Z/XDC eliminates this disruption entirely, allowing you to hook into running programs, set breakpoints, and trace execution without any restarts.

Production mainframe environments run on batch jobs and started tasks, the workhorses that keep your enterprise systems humming. When these programs encounter issues, you need debugging capabilities that integrate into your existing JCL workflows without disrupting production operations. CDF (Command Debug Facility) sessions in Z/XDC provide exactly that: a powerful way to debug batch jobs and started tasks while maintaining full control over the debugging scope and session management.

Most modernization projects fail the same way: they start rebuilding before they understand what they're rebuilding. I see this constantly. A new CTO joins, looks at 40-year-old COBOL code, and declares "we're getting off the mainframe." The next thing you know, they've hired a team of Java developers to rewrite everything for the cloud. Three years and several million dollars later, they're still not done. The new system performs worse than the old one. Critical features got missed. And they end up having to hire back the COBOL developers they let go—at much higher salaries.

Frank Chu, Senior Software Engineer at ColeSoft, was recently elected to join the board of SHARE, an independent volunteer-run information technology association that provides education, professional networking and industry influence for the enterprise IT community. Frank shares his thoughts about his new role - and the role of SHARE in the mainframe community.

Debugging mainframe applications requires flexibility in how you initiate your debugging environment. Z/XDC provides five distinct methods to start debugging sessions, each tailored to different scenarios and workflows. Let's walk through all five options and help you figure out which approach fits your specific situation best.

AI-generated code promises to revolutionize development: write a prompt, get working code, ship faster. The reality looks different. AI produces code that compiles, runs, and does something. Whether it does what you actually need is another question entirely.